The rapid acceptance and growth of packet-based networks has led to the development of numerous multimedia services, which are beneficial in both residential and business contexts. These multimedia services include application sharing, video conferencing, media streaming, gaming, and the like. These multimedia services are predominantly provided over packet-based networks between various media clients, which are generally implemented on a personal computer. Most of these multimedia services benefit when a voice connection is concurrently established between the end users. In a video conferencing environment, the conferencing parties need a voice connection to enable the conversation, yet may require media sessions to provide the associated video or share application information between the conferencing parties. Although packet-based networks are sufficient to facilitate the multimedia services, the corresponding voice connection is generally set up independently over a circuit-switched network. To date, packet-based voice sessions generally do not provide the level of quality or reliability as that provided by the circuit-switched networks. Thus, the end users of a multimedia session will generally independently set up a voice call to correspond to their multimedia sessions, wherein there is no association between the multimedia sessions and the voice call.
Given the ever-increasing popularity of multimedia sessions and the desire to have an associated voice call over a circuit-switched network, there is a need for an efficient and effective technique for automatically associating packet-based multimedia sessions and voice calls over a circuit-switched network. There is a further need for a technique to control these multimedia sessions and circuit-switched voice calls in a centralized fashion, wherein establishing a voice call will automatically result in configuring corresponding media clients to prepare for establishing a corresponding multimedia session, and vice versa. There is also a need for a user interface that provides centralized control of the voice calls and multimedia sessions, such that the user can readily control the voice calls and multimedia services, as well as receive information pertaining thereto.